Congress MLA Aditi Singh Joins BJP Ahead Of UP Polls

Rebel UP Congress leader Aditi Singh - the MLA from the state's Rae Bareli Assembly constituency - has joined the ruling BJP in Lucknow.The move comes months before elections in the politically key state, in which the BJP is bidding for re-election in the face of massive protests by farmers against the farm laws, as well as protests against skyrocketing prices of essential goods, like fuel and vegetables.An increasingly vocal critic of the Congress and its leadership, Aditi Singh last week slammed senior leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra for questioning the controversial farm laws."Priyanka Gandhi had a problem when bills were brought. She has a problem when the laws have been repealed. What does she want? She should say it clearly. She is only politicising the matter. She has now run out of issues to politicise," Aditi Singh was quoted by news agency ANI"As far as Lakhimpur (where farmers were run over by a convoy allegedly driven by a Union Minister's son) and other issues are concerned, Priyanka Gandhi always politicised it. CBI probe is underway in the Lakhimpur incident... Supreme Court is taking cognisance of it. If she doesn't trust the institutions, I can't understand whom does she trust?" she continued.Aditi Singh, 34, was suspended from the party's women's wing in May last year.Rae Bareli is a Congress stronghold; it has voted for the party in every Lok Sabha election since 1980 (the exceptions were in 1996 and 1998, when the BJP's Ashok Singh was elected).Ads by Voting in the Rae Bareli Assembly seat has been similarly one-sided, with the Congress having claimed it four times in the last six elections. The two times it failed to do so were in 2007 and 2012, when then-expelled Congress leader Akhilesh Kumar Singh won his fourth and fifth elections.Aditi Singh is Akhilesh Kumar Singh's daughter. She won the seat in 2017 on a Congress ticket, beating the BSP's Shahbaz Khan by nearly 90,000 votes.The BJP candidate - Anita Srivastava - was a distant third, over one lakh votes behind.The ruling party will hope the induction of Aditi Singh will help flip the Congress bastion, 

which would be a hugely important result, should that happen.